Conventionally, liquid crystal display devices have been employed for a wide variety of electronic devices. The liquid crystal display devices have the following advantages. That is, the liquid crystal display devices are thin, lightweight, and low in electric power consumption. Therefore, it is expected that utilization of the liquid crystal display devices will be more increased.
In recent years, a common object of various display devices has been to reduce electric power consumption. As one of effective techniques of attaining this object, pause driving has been suggested. A display device which carries out the pause driving does not scan its display panel in each frame in a subsequent pause period after scanning the display panel in each frame in a scanning period. In the pause period, voltages applied to respective pixels of the display panel in a previous frame are retained and, accordingly, display of an image is also maintained. This causes no scanning signal and no image signal to be supplied to the display panel in the pause period. Therefore, it is possible to correspondingly reduce electric power consumption.
Moreover, a technique has been developed which allows a further reduction in electric power consumption of a liquid crystal display device which carries out the pause driving. For example, Cited Document 1 discloses a display device capable of reducing, by stopping transmission of image data from an image memory in a pause period, electric power used for the transmission of the image data in the pause period.